Gay speaks to the soul of every fat woman who has tried to make it through this world with everyone only having their best interests at heart. It didn’t have to happen that way but after countless men and women in her twenties who saw nothing wrong with treating her the way she expected she should be treated physically, what could she possibly think? She didn’t know what to do with her body she didn’t know that letting people treat her badly wasn’t the default. While telling the story of the man who was probably her first true love, she says he was the only person who ever touched her with any gentleness, even when she asked him not to. Not just her size, but what she does with it. And by that point, there’s another culprit for the sadness in her life: her body. Even the idea that “rape” was something that happened to people, and that it wasn’t her fault, takes a long time to reach her. I lost my voice, but I had words.”Īs we move through her life, out of high school, into an aborted stint at Yale and a doctorate program in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, we also see into her psyche as a woman who has not yet come to terms with her childhood trauma.
It was soothing to give voice to what I could not say out loud. “I couldn’t tell anyone what had happened to me, so I wrote the same story a thousand different ways. This is not to say that she has Mary Sued herself into every story that she has written, but she has taken her own experience and used her writing to express the hurt, anger, frustration, horror, and a million other words running through her mind and body. She has always been a writer, and in the years leading up to An Untamed State, Ayiti, and Dangerous Women, writing fiction has helped her take the words she could not say aloud and express them on paper. Because if there’s one thing we know of Roxane Gay, it’s that she can create some of the most devastating stories, told in the most gorgeous ways. They help you bolster your heart for the rest of the story.Īnd as we journey with her through the story of her body, we also discover the story of her mind. The brief stints that allow you to smile, getting little glimpses into the time before, are sweet. There is a darling story about her Haitian American family having meals around the table, and the loving relationship she had with her mother, at least for a brief time. “Food was not only comfort food also became my friend because it was constant and I didn’t need to be anything but myself when I ate.” You can have knowledge that prepares you for reading such an experience, but we can never be truly prepared for Gay’s words before they come out in her deliberate, heartbreaking way. While the description of the event that changed her life is terrible, her recounting of the aftermath is devastating. But the visceral reaction to her blatant, open words, could not be escaped. Having read Bad Feminist a couple years ago, I was not taken unawares by the story of Gay’s rape, or of her reaction to it. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it.” This isn’t to say that there are not heartbreaking moments in the last third of the book merely that they are eclipsed by the things that have made her the stronger person she finds herself to be today. More about moving forward, even if it is impossible to truly move on. More of Roxane seeing the better things about life and herself. Then, I found myself reading more there was less terror, less of the terrible, and more hope. There are some things that need time to process before you can move on. At first I would read chapters five or ten at a time, unable to go further, or just unwilling. I spent several weeks taking in Hunger’s words.
And already I was aware that I would be listening for quite some time. I knew then that this was going to be something. The first thing I noticed about Hunger was the chapter count: 88 chapters. “I know that to be frank about my body makes some people uncomfortable. But what you don’t know until you’re enmeshed in her life is how much the idea of obesity and other people makes an impact on her life. Going into Hunger, and knowing what Gay looks like, you know that there will be references to food, weight, and hunger. Statistics say that 34.9 percent of Americans are obese and 68.6 percent of Americans are obese or overweight.